I Swore I'd Burn This Book

A world-famous author. An unfinished book upon his death. The writer’s son, faced with a terrible decision.

Meet Dmitri Boris Godunov, son of Russian-American literary giant Vladimir Godunov, whose rapturous, scandalous breakthrough novel, Annabeth’s Limbs, secured its author’s place in the literary pantheon and continues to top banned book lists a half-century after publication. Shadowed by a Salieri-like figure whose forthcoming biography threatens to expose Vladimir in monstrous ways, Dmitri is faced with a Hamlet-like dilemma: whether or not to publish his father’s final, unfinished work, which he had promised to destroy upon the author’s death. Along with rapacious literary agent Simon Graves, Dmitri must divine his dead father’s true wishes and weigh the consequences of disobeying that vow.

With broad, razor-sharp humour, the novel has an antic energy that brings to mind Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums or Andrew Sean Greer’s Less. On other levels, this is a novel that eloquently traverses the literary world and investigates the creative process—a sophisticated game of high-brow fan fiction in conversation with the Nabokov of Lolita and Pale Fire and the Philip Roth of the Zuckerman novels.

A comic novel committed to the deep seriousness of humour, the book ultimately reveals itself to be a fully felt work about fathers and sons, the blessing and curse of family inheritance, a treatise on why writers write, and a loving tribute to one of literature’s supreme authors. Intensely literary-minded and broadly commercial, I Swore I'd Burn This Book is also that rarity: a happy book about happiness.